


snippets

by cheshirequeenwithoutaheart



Series: dlwp [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Eldritch Abominations, Gen, Horror, Self-Mutilation, Werewolves, Witches, all of this falls under the title "it happens at some point. probably"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 22:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 4,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22681984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheshirequeenwithoutaheart/pseuds/cheshirequeenwithoutaheart
Summary: lmao most of what's being posted here is way too short to be alone so. in a snippets dump it is ig. half of it's no longer "canon" too, but i like it so.
Series: dlwp [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1631650
Kudos: 1





	1. 1

she can understand why he doesn’t.

there’s a certain sense of desperation behind binding your magic, your soul, to one object for the rest of eternity; or until someone destroys that object at least.

to bind it to a _skull_ of all things?

yeah, there’s a certain level of desperation there.


	2. 2

she tilts her head to the side and considers the pile of armour-like skin and long legs leaking ichor onto the tile floor of her kitchen.

“you know, you could have at least put it in the bath,” she says to the otherwise empty room.


	3. 3

to identify which witch works with which, witches will have a brand (of sorts) placed on the palm of their non-dominant hand. the brand is always some kind of animal, “mythical” or otherwise. (example: colleen has a goat on her right palm)

to break the contact with a group of witches, you need to disfigure the brand in someway.

if you’re cast out of a witch group then a single slash through the brand will mark you as a “betrayer of secrets”, an “oath breaker” or something else. witches are incredibly petty so it could be for anything… that they can justify, no matter how stupid it sounds.


	4. 4

_Gratia dei omnia luce, virtute daemonum amittunt damnabilia_,’ her mind chants like it’s a prayer to a god she’s long stopped believing in.

Black infuses into her veins, spreading like a poison across her skin as it greys and cracks and peels; the marble countertops crack under the strength of the thorn-like claws her fingernails had grown into.

Demonic possessions, even ones she holds off through pure willpower alone, are never pretty.

‘_Gratia dei omnia luce, virtute daemonum amittunt damnabilia.’_ She’s hunched over, feet flat against the cabinet doors, breathing in large mouthfuls of air like it’s the last thing she’ll do.

Maybe it will be.


	5. 5

she smiles and it’s all teeth, teeth, _teeth_.

a being masquerading as something it hasn’t been since its day of birth, since eyes that knew nothing else first saw phantoms and ghosts.

(the whole eldritch abomination thing is new, she knows, but she never really had the chance to be human.)


	6. 6

she pulls her hand away from her throat and black sludge seeps slowly out of thin scratches that were once deep enough to sever her windpipe.

it oozes down, slow like treacle and dirty like pond scum and thick like molasses, and blends with the black t-shirt she wears.

‘ah,’ he thinks, distantly. ‘that would be her blood.’


	7. 7

the earth remembers her.

it would be hard not to, the earth would muse if it were able, after she willingly connected herself with a ley line (despite having almost all of her magic) and listened to the earth at a deeper level than most were willing.

the earth remembers her, not in the way humans do, but in the way she always finds the plants she needs, the way animals recognise her and the sea calms when she needs it to.

it remembers her.

that is why it calls out, nudges its way into her brain; a whisper and a shout that urges her to connect once again, that urges her to once more feel the mind of a planet.


	8. 8

“Well,” she says, voice deadpan as she scans the room, taking in the moss in the middle of the carpet and the moth wings strewn across the windowsill, “still think this is just another faerie kidnapping case?”

Beside her, Axel huffs. “Okay, okay. You’ve made your point. Don’t go blaming every disappearance of children on the fair folk, got it.”

She doesn’t verbally respond, just rolls her eyes and turns to the skull floating in a ball of fire. “You know what to do.”

He floats halfway over, looks down for a minute and turns back. “Death’s head hawk moths, if I’m not mistaken, my lady.”

“What do we know of that leaves moth wings and moss behind?” Axel wonders, scratching the side of his head.

“Nothing,” she answers succinctly.


	9. 9

Storm clouds, rolling like the sea below them, were on the horizon. Slate grey, inky black: lightning cracks the darkness in two sporadically.

It will rain soon. The twinge in her left hip tells her so.

It will be heavy rain, not as heavy as a squall, but it will be cold.

But it is a good day.

A good day for calling a deep sea mermaid at least.

Colleen flicks the catch - the one keeping the lid on the tiny bottle closed - over and over again in an idle manner.

She is careful though; careful not to spill any of the blood inside. Not until she needs to.

Beside one of her feet, on the old wood of the jetty, is half of a clam shell - a warm brown colour on the outside and a pale pink colour on the inside - that contains only a roughly carved piece of bone; it’s in a shape that might have been a mermaid, but could just as easily be a monster.

Finally, after a long moment of waiting, she picks up the shell and places it down on the water; it doesn’t sink, doesn’t move, in the suddenly still water. Colleen pushes it away and waits until it’s a fair distance from the jetty before flicking the catch one last time.

“Venus ventura abyssi, afferte mihi respondeat quaero,” she recites from memory, sweeps her arm wide and watches as the blood meets the water.

There’s silence and there’s stillness. 

The water around the shell starts to glow and Colleen takes several steps back; she’s come to expect what will happen next.

A great head - dirty green with black scales in the middle of the forehead and trailing down the cheek - starts to rise out of the water. Black hair almost completely obscures the tri-tipped ears and the gills from view. The black scales continue to trail down, down the collar and down the arms.

The sea woman stops rising when her torso is completely visible. She peers down at Colleen with fish-like eyes and smiles with all of her teeth when she realizes who has called her.

“Orange fishy,” she coos, leaning down ever so slightly.

Colleen inclines her head slightly to the side and smiles, a quick fond upturn of her lips. 

“Loire.”


	10. 10

eyes snap open and she blinks; once, twice, three times.

the morning dew clinging to the grass in front of her face tells her she’s been lying there for at least a day.

she closes her eyes again and breathes in, forces the spell she uses to mask her heartbeat as a steady pulse back into effect.

she half opens her eyes and watches a drop of water fall from the tip of a blade of grass; she counts the number of times her heart beats for roughly a minute.

then she sits up.

her skin is damp, her clothes partially cling to her frame, there are twigs in her hair, and an ache in the space in-between the bottom of her ribcage.

her hand moves down, presses against it, and comes away clean - well, there’s dirt under her nails and what looks to be congealed drops of blood on the skin around her cuticles, but they aren’t any dirtier.

the wound’s healed at least, which is something.

she breathes in again and presses her palm into the ground, ignores the part of her that wants to fall back and lie down again, ignores the part of her that wants to rip chunks out of the soft earth to curb the urge to scream.

by her reckoning she’s been dead for at least a day after that stupid fucking faerie who never learned what ‘no’ meant shoved a fucking sword in-between her ribs.

it’s the shortest time she’s ever been dead for, not that she’s died in a while (since before she met inyrxiaz if she’s done the math right and that was over four years ago), and she really doesn’t want to think too deeply as to why that is.

she knows that, if she does, she’ll probably scream and rant and commit murder.

‘well,’ she decides, pushing herself up off the ground and pulling twigs from her hair, 'there’s an idea’.

that faerie prince might’ve been saved by the fact his sister was a queen the last time he tried to get her to marry him (and wasn’t that traumatic. she still got phantom pains from having to rip that seal out of where it been implanted over where her womb had once been), but now… 

now it was an eye for an eye. blood for blood. his life for hers, despite the fact she was still alive.

'perhaps i’ll rip his wings off before i kill him,’ colleen thinks absently as she begins the walk back into town.


	11. 11

her voice changes, drops several octaves and layers with several others. the brown of her pupils blackens and spreads, turns the sclera of her eyes into twin voids.

she makes a sound, a snarl, in the back of her throat; low and rough and inhuman, exactly like the warning shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. it reverberates through her bones, escapes between her teeth and echoes in the surrounding woods.

her lips pull back into a sneer, two rows of sharp teeth visible. her canines have been replaced by two teeth that were bigger than the rest and one was still bigger than the other.

the callouses on her fingers and palms now look like patches of scaly dirty emerald skin. if you look at the bottom of her feet - not that you could because of her shoes - you will see that the skin there has also been replaced by green scales.

her nails change too; grow longer, harder, stronger. they darken, shift into a colour that is somewhere between dark grey and dark green; fully capable of rending flesh from bone without much effort.


	12. 12

It’s a small memorial, hidden away in the shell of the house she’d spent the entirety of her adult life in, strangely undisturbed by the decaying floorboards and the beam that fell down sometime after her death.

Colleen leaves a trail of footprints in the dust as she makes her way across the room. She pauses for a moment, hangs suspended in time as she considers the picture and the candle holders.

She shrugs eventually and crouches down, placing the bouquet of lilies in front of the black and white photograph. For a second, she runs her fingers over the bright orange petals and marvels slightly at how close in colour her hair is to them, before pulling away.

“And so another year passes,” Colleen murmurs, staring straight into the eyes that cannot see her.

It isn’t with disdain, or hate, in her eyes or on her face that she looks at her with, but neutrality. Lips pressed into a thin line, eyes flat, and body language relaxed.

“I wonder, sometimes, why I keep coming here,” she continues, standing up out of her crouch and shoving her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket. “I don’t really like you, or care about you, which you knew very well.”

“I suppose,” she turns to look out of one of the broken window, watches the sunlight on the other side, “that it’s out of some kind of duty. You were my teacher, however much I hate that, so I suppose I should be grateful.”

“But, Nadia, don’t take that as me admitting that you helped to make me who I am,” she gives the photograph one last look before turning and heading out of the house, “cause you didn’t, and neither did Jason or Axel. I made me.”

And she walks out, leaves the orange lilies to rot for another year, into a world filled with sunlight. A far cry from the dusty old house she left behind.

(didn’t you know? an orange lily means “hatred”)


	13. 13

there’s something in the woods, the townsfolk say. something big, and hungry, and reptilian. something lurking just out of sight, hidden amongst the greens and the browns of the trees.

they’ve the proof to back up their tales.

boar, killed and half eaten, with bite marks too big to be any kind of hound kept by the town’s inhabitants, is found. sometimes, they find pieces of shed skin, too big and yet too small to come from any kind of snake in the area. once, they find a tooth, long and sharp, and a child afraid of shadows, of going anywhere it might be hiding.

they burn it. they burn the tooth, and the skin, and the dead boar. they hope it’ll go away, the thing in the woods.

it doesn’t, not really. 

turn something into a tale to scare little kids and it’ll never really go away.

. ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ .

there’s a witch in the woods, the townsfolk say. young in the face and old in the eyes, scarred on the legs and burned on the arms.

you know she’s a witch, they say, because of her hair. her red hair. 

(really, she hums and smiles, lips pressed together in an attempt to contain her laughter, it’s more orange then red)

you know she’s a witch, they say, because of her eyes. her black eyes.

(actually, she laughs and pours brightly coloured liquid from oddly shaped bottles into a small cauldron, you’ll find they’re dark brown, but i can see where you get confused)

you know she’s a witch, they say, because the thing in the woods listens to her. she controls the beast.

(silly mortal, she leans in, sharp teeth on display and eyes shifting from brown and white to red and black, i am the only beast in the woods and i prefer

butcher 

eldritch being

god

venynz

colleen)


	14. 14

she glares at the mirror, orange hair a damp and tangled mess decorated with a few determined bits of plant life, and yanks the hair brush down, growls lowly when the hair strands pull at her scalp.

if she had a dollar for every half rate necromancer and cheap zombie hoard she’d dealt with in a swamp, she’d have enough cash to buy a cheap zombie hoard movie. possibly set in a swamp.

what is it with necromancers and swamps anyway. what happened to a nice dank crypt being their lair.

at least in a crypt, the worst thing you had to deal with was spiders and dust and maybe a skeleton which, really, isn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things.

try being a literal passenger in your own body whilst some demon tries to take over the world, again.

wait, that’s more an annoyance than something to be concerned about. and she’s not even concerned anymore.

with a final of irritation, she gives up on brushing her hair and starts checking her pockets for a pair of scissors.

it was about time to chop her hair off anyway.


	15. 15

here’s what she knows: her converse are bloodstained, her t-shirts are secondhand except for when they ain’t, and immortality does not, despite what some people may think, mean she has a lot of money stashed somewhere. it means that she does have something stashed away somewhere; artefacts and smoking pipes and teapots. only one of those things poses a danger to her these days and even then, it’d have had to have been one really bad day.

here’s what she knows: her hair is brighter than it was at fourteen, her eyes are darker than they were at nineteen, and there will always be power simmering just below her skin. she’s old old old and she hasn’t fit right in this dimension since she first let the eldritch in, she realises now, but this is her place and she won’t leave it, can’t leave it, for the realm where the rest of her kind dwell. ‘cept they aren’t the rest of her kind are they? she’s born from a human witch with the slightest hint of devil’s blood flowing through her veins and she predates all things, even them.

here’s what she knows: ever since those countless ages spent as formless thoughts in a place where light doesn’t exist yet and sound will not exist, she’s known herself. eldritch and other, disrupting the universe and slotting into place in equal measure.

here’s what she knows.


	16. 16

there’s something off about the house.

now. that might be because there’s a witch living in it, but he’s pretty sure that not all witch houses look like this. wouldn’t work well with the whole ‘blending in’ thing they got going on, what with the fact it looks like several houses were assembled and then knocked down in places, with the rest being smashed together into the end result that was this… frankenhouse, for lack of a better term.

parts of the house’s outside walls weren’t even the same colour for odin’s sake. there’s no way a witch would have a house like this. it stood out too much, for one thing.

‘although,’ he thinks, looking around the area with the faintest bit of unease crawling down his spine, and it really didn’t have far to go, before snapping his attention back to the front door at the sight of those… blood soaked statuettes, hidden in the dying grass. ‘it is pretty damn remote, this place. and who sends mail to a witch through the postal service, anyway? nobody’d come here if they didn’t know it existed. frankly, I can see why she’d be confident enough to live in this kind of house.’

that was his view anyway.

but what did he know? he’s just a drawf tasked with meeting one Colleen O’ Sullivan, last of the Unspeakable Coven, to make sure she’d still follow the Witch’s Council rules.

although why an actual witch couldn’t do it was beyond him. he suspects it’s because of that interesting rumour that she was no longer just a witch, but instead something more. something… unbound by the rules of her previous kind.

he gulps. if he gets out of this relatively intact, he’s going to get very drunk. and possibly quit. maybe turn to wood carving. he’d always liked that.

but… he had a job to do.

he knocks on the door, internally wincing at the sudden shaking the walls seem to exhibit. one more reason a witch wouldn’t live in a house like this: they were unshakably paranoid about being crushed by houses.

the door opens, revealing the witch he’s meant to meet. she doesn’t seem surprised to see him, although that could’ve been because he’d been standing outside her house for ten minutes trying to work up the nerve to knock.

she looks down, arches an eyebrow. those eyes make it clear he better hurry up, otherwise there’s a good chance he’ll be leaving with less parts then he arrived with.

he coughs, opens his mouth. “Witch Council business. Ólafr at your service. permission to come in?”

not a twitch. she looks at him, face blank.

idly he thinks she could stop him from coming in with great ease. he’s very interested in making sure she doesn’t feel like doing so.

then she nods, face shifting from blank to… oddly serene, and opens the door wider, stepping aside to let him in. the door closes behind him with, he hopes, not a sound of finality, but the ordinary sound of someone shutting the damn door.

the wallpaper is peeling, he notes as he follows behind her, and yellow in places. of course, it’s also red, he hopes not from blood, and green too. he thinks it was supposed to be some creamy colour, originally.

‘that observation of this being a frankenhouse was perhaps more accurate than I thought.’

that kitchen definitely looked like something out of an old house. down a step onto stone floors, with another door to leave and enter through, and so forth. lots of knives on the wall, herbs hanging down and a cookbook book that looks suspiciously like one of those human ones.

there’s a skeleton perched on the table. a very tall skeleton. he thinks it’s watching him as he walks past.

then there’s the rooms that sort of… give off the air they should have pink walls and be filled with decorated plates and crotchet experiments. not a… framed set of faerie wings, pinned like a butterfly, and an octopus candle holder that is definitely moving.

he looks at the room they stop in. it’s long, has to be to fit that impressive table.

'frankenhouse,’ he thinks with some hysteria.

the… woman who might be a witch, might be a being who thrives on madness, sits down on one side of the long table. he sits opposite.

“tea?” her expression is still serene as she speaks for the first time, her voice deeper than he’d expected, and rougher to boot, but something sharp lurks behind her eyes.

he declines the tea.

she shrugs, a clear 'suit yourself’, before clicking her fingers.

he looks down at the other end of the table when he hears small footsteps, barely stops himself from flinching when a teapot and cup, both black with white spider legs, greet him.

the cup stops in front of Colleen, tucks its legs under itself, whilst the teapot angles itself to pour.

she dismisses the pot back to where it was originally with what looks suspiciously like a pat to its side, like a dog, and another click of her fingers.

“so,” she looks at him and, for the first time since putting it on, that serene mask breaks with a wide grin, 'what can I do for the esteemed Witch’s Council?’

'her voice is rather mocking,’ he notes distantly, more interested with the sharp teeth she was currently displaying.

'yep. definitely getting drunk. definitely quitting.’


	17. 17

it is, perhaps, several months before Colleen bothers to mention her little jaunt into the distant past of before the goddamn big bang to anyone other than her house of misfits.

in her defence, she’d been busy. there’d been the case of leviathan, and then there was that business with the fisherman and the mermaid, and then she’d had to deal with another demon by way of chess and…

… well, she’d been busy. very busy. too busy to explain to ex-collegues and old friends that she was now, apparently, the eldest thing in the bloody universe thanks to a sorcerer who just had to be experimenting with time travel devices, the git.

she was going to. eventually. maybe. when she finished the powerpoint that made it a bit easier to explain.

~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~. ~

it’s 3 in the morning when Axel awakes.

he stares at the ceiling for a moment, wonders why he’s awake, and closes his eyes to return to that frankly lovely dream involving kaius and a kid that looked unusually like the two of them… before sitting upright with an aborted gasp.

“wha-” oh. Kaius is awake. oops.

Axel ignores his husband, aside from a quick apologetic look, distantly thinking he’ll apologise properly later, because that magical presence was strong enough and dark enough to awaken him and it’s still in the house.

he only crashes into the wall twice on his way to the kitchen, picking up an umbrella as he goes.

carefully, because those years as a PI did teach him something about charging in blindly thank you very much, he peers around the door into the dark room.

it’s 3 in the goddamn morning. couldn’t this have waited till 3 in the afternoon?

it’s quiet. there’s no movement. he turns on the light. and shrieks.

Colleen blinks at him, the beginnings of an all too familiar glare that he never really got used to forming, from her perch in the counter.

“I did not miss that in the past,” she rolls her eyes at him, at his completely justified shrieking because who the hell expects an elder god to show up at 3 in the freaking morning.

“what the fuck?!” he gasps, grip on the umbrella relaxing, staring at her like she’s grown a second head. which, honestly, would be one of the least surprising things to happen when it came to Colleen O'Sullivan.

he latches onto what she said, hoping that it would actually make sense to his tired brain. “the past?! what?!”

“yeah, took a trip to the past a couple months back. didn’t you hear?”

“no?!”

“oh. well, sucks to be you then.”

it’s 3 in the morning when Axel learns that Colleen is now definitely older than him.


	18. 18

she’s just aoife.

she’s just aoife, and her magic’s a thing that backfires and twists itself in knots more often than it helps her. she isn’t her mother, doesn’t have that kinda power, or that kinda luck, or that boldness. she doesn’t turn into a lizard, she just gets snarly and veiny and occasionally quite bloody (this is before, you understand). 

she’s just aoife, and sometimes closest she wants to get to crime scenes and bloody spectacles is writing them in her books. she knows she doesn’t have a choice in the matter (it’s in the blood after all, that thirst for adventure and danger and mystery, right up there with the o’sullivan luck.)

and she doesn't really mind, anyhow. 

she’s just aoife, and she doesn't have a father. not really anyway. her mother doesn’t do well with marriage, except for that one time in the 30s, long before aoife herself came to be. she doesn’t mind, doesn’t need one when she’s got a talking cat and a talking toad and a talking skeleton to take his place. 

she’s just aoife, and her mother just so happens to be colleen o’sullivan (or venynz, when she’s green and tall and scaley, and sometimes when she isn't), and she might not be as strong as her mother, and her magic might backfire on her, but that’s okay. 

she’s just aoife, and that isn’t a bad thing.


End file.
